e--but now
that the last of these veils had been torn away they faced each other as
strangers.

* * * * *

The habit of keeping factory hours always drove Amherst forth long
before his wife's day began, and in the course of one of his early
tramps he met Miss Brent and Cicely setting out for a distant swamp
where rumour had it that a rare native orchid might be found. Justine's
sylvan tastes had developed in the little girl a passion for such
pillaging expeditions, and Cicely, who had discovered that her
step-father knew almost as much about birds and squirrels as Miss Brent
did about flowers, was not to be appeased till Amherst had scrambled
into the pony-cart, wedging his long legs between a fern-box and a
lunch-basket, and balancing a Scotch terrier's telescopic body across
his knees.

The season was so mild that only one or two light windless frosts had
singed the foliage of oaks and beeches, and gilded the roadsides with a
smooth carpeting of maple leaves. The morning haze rose like smoke from
burnt-out pyres of sumach and sugar-maple; a silver bloom lay on the
furrows of the ploughed fields; and now and then, as they drove on, the
wooded road showed at its end a tarnished disk of light, where sea and
sky were merged.

At length they left the road for a winding track through scrub-oaks and
glossy thickets of mountain-laurel; the track died out at the foot of a
wooded knoll, and clambering along its base they came upon the swamp.
There it lay in charmed solitude, shut in by a tawny growth of larch and
swamp-maple, its edges burnt out to smouldering shades of russet,
ember-red and ashen-grey, while the quaking centre still preserved a
jewel-like green, where hidden lanes of moisture wound between islets
tufted with swamp-cranberry and with the charred browns of fern and wild
rose and bay. Sodden earth and decaying branches gave forth a strange
sweet odour, as of the aromatic essences embalming a dead summer; and
the air charged with this scent was so still that the snapping of
witch-hazel pods, the drop of a nut, the leap of a startled frog,
pricked the silence with separate points of sound.

The pony made fast, the terrier released, and fern-box and lunch-basket
slung over Amherst's shoulder, the three explorers set forth on their
journey. Amherst, as became his sex, went first; but after a few
absent-minded plunges into the sedgy depths between the islets, he was
ordered to rel